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Software, who needs it?

By Annabelle McIver

IT’S PRETTY much a fact of life that software is easier to design than
hardware. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, the best way to solve a digital
problem is to buy a standard chip and write software to make it do what you want
it to do. Designing nonstandard chips is a job only for companies with plenty of
time and money.

But not for much longer if an optimistic group of computer scientists have
their way. They hope to automate one of the most difficult and costly tasks in
chip design. The results so far are promising and, if they succeed, creating
custom chips should be much easier and cheaper than today.

Chips are made up of millions of minuscule components, such as adders and
inverters, which manipulate the electronic zeros and ones that computers feed
on. But selecting which components to use and how they should be connected
together is a highly specialised, labour-intensive and time-consuming job. A
handful of research groups around the world hope to streamline this job with
software packages called hardware compilers. These will take any application
program—such as one for collecting data from a sensor—and turn it
into a list of the components and connections needed to make a dedicated chip to
perform the task.

Other software already exists that can turn such lists, known as netlists,
into chip designs ready to be etched in silicon. In this way, the new hardware
compilers should open the door for programmers with no specialist knowledge of
hardware to design custom chips. Alternatively, say the researchers, their
netlists can …